Welcome to my
Bob Dylan™ Musical Roots
and Influences Blog
(a previous incarnation was bobdylanroots.com)
of Manfred Helfert, Mainz, Germany.
Any copyrighted items are included here for "nonprofit educational purposes" (one of the criteria of "fair use", Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107). Most audio recordings linked to (but not hosted) in this blog are believed to be either uncopyrighted or to have lapsed into Public Domain in the EU where this blog originates.

In his own and Jim Rooney's book about the Cambridge folk scene,Baby Let Me Follow You Down (Garden City, 1979), Eric recalls:

Dylan came up once. It was Huck Finn hat time, before he made his first record... We
played croquet... and Dylan was absolutely the worst player I have ever
seen. He was having a ball, giggling like mad. A little spastic gnome.
He could not connect the mallet with the ball!
We went driving around looking for people to join the party, playing
harmonica duets all the time. When we got to my apartment he wasn't much
interested in playing; he wanted to listen. So I played "He Was A
Friend Of Mine," "Wasn't That A Mighty Storm, " "Baby, Let Me Lay It On
You, " "Acne," and a couple of others. It was something the way he was soaking up material in those days -- like a sponge and a half.

Later somebody said, "Hey, Bob's put one of your songs on his album." They were talking about
"Baby, Let Me Follow You Down"
which had a spoken introduction saying he first heard it from me "...in
the green fields [sic] of Harvard University." The tune was the same,
and the chords were real pretty, but they weren't the same. I don't know
if he changed them or if he'd heard a different version from Van Ronk....

The label on the record lists "R. Von Schmidt" as the composer but
Witmark had copyrighted it under Dylan's name. I figured it was a good
plug for me, so what the hell.

The next time I saw Bob he said, "Hey, man, that's your song" or
something like that. And sure enough, a little later I got a contract
signed by him listing us as co-composers. It was to become effective
when I signed it....

So I wrote Witmark and gave them the "facts," but
explained that if we co-wrote the moment I signed the contract, then we
co-wrote it when the record was released and royalties should start from
there. Geno [Foreman] wasn't around at the time, and I figured I could
split them with him at a later date.

They wrote back a nice note thanking me for my trouble and saying that I
was quite right, I didn't have a claim to the song, and they were
honoring "a prior copyright. "I figured they were talking about Blind Boy Fuller's
heirs or something, but they were talking about Dylan's copyright.Apparently they turned around with the "facts" I had supplied them and
used them to void that copyright.

Witness the strange case of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down," a song that Bob Dylan included on his [[1962]] debut album [[Bob Dylan]] on Columbia Records. Von Schmidt, now 61 years old, shared all the messy, convoluted details with SongTalk in a phone conversation from his Connecticut home.

While Von Schmidt still plays music (in the spring of 1992 he toured
Italy with his partner Linda Clifford), he primarily makes his living
through writing children's and history books and painting.

Dylan came to Von Schmidt's home one evening in 1960 to jam, when Eric
performed for him a version of "Baby Let Me Lay It On You," which he
thought was "a Blind Boy Fuller song that I had learned from another white guy, Geno Foreman."

The song later ended up on Dylan's debut album as "Baby, Let Me
Follow You Down." The chords Dylan used on his song, Von Schmidt also
believed, came from a Dave Van Ronk song.

"The way I played it was as close as I could get to Geno
Foreman's version, which I assumed was Blind Boy Fuller, but I never
heard him play this thing."

In any case, what Dylan ended up playing on the album "was not what
he heard from me," Von Schmidt noted. "There is a long history to who
indeed wrote this song and who has what part of the copyright," he adds.

"What
Dylan said is not that 'I learned this song from Eric Von Schmidt,'
it's that he 'first heard' it from me. But that was confusing enough to
the Columbia people when they made the record. They indeed listed me
(in 1962) as the author on the record's stamp, which is about as close
you can [[get]] if you are going to launch a lawsuit."

"What finally broke the whole thing to some kind of completion [[is]] when [film director Martin] Scorcese did The Last Waltz, in which Dylan performed 'Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.'" ...

"What finally happened was that Manny Greenhill, who had been my manager back in the folkie days, also managed Gary Davis.
He sat Gary down and asked. 'What songs did you write?' Aside from the
'Star Spangled Banner' and maybe 'Moonlight Becomes You,' it was every
song that anybody heard of, Gary Davis wrote. One of them as 'Baby, Let
Me Follow You Down.'"

Von Schmidt thinks there may be some justification to Davis's contention because Davis and Fuller were both from Durham, NC. "Blind Boy Fuller probably learned more from Gary than the other way around. ..."

Von Schmidt once heard Davis flay the song, and it was close enough for him to believe that he was its author.

[[Although Von Schmidt is credited on Dylan's albums, he]] ... has never received any royalties, despite the recognition.After Dylan's second album ..., Columbia wrote a letter to Von
Schmidt, informing him that from that time on, Dylan and he would share
the composition of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down."

"So I wrote back, 'If indeed Dylan and I are co-authors of
this thing, why are you starting to pay me now, instead of when the
record first came out?" But in my letter back, I was scrupulously
honest, when I heard the song, that I though it was a Blind Boy Fuller
song, that I changed it a little bit, and Dylan had changed it a little
bit.I got this wonderful letter back [from Columbia] ... that said: 'You're
quite right, Eric, you have no rights to this song' .... They didn't
know who did have rights to it, but they knew I didn't have rights to
it. That was that. I never got a dime."

But Von Schmidt doesn't hold any hard feelings towards Dylan, who he
calls the "best PR man I ever had." "Sometimes I think I'd like to learn
his version of it."

Recordings in bold letters or with hyperlinks can be accessed/downloaded from this post.If anybody has any of the missing variants, please make them available and provide the link in a commentary to this post.